Dark humor pervades provocative works by Jesse Draxler, Jordan Weber and Mark Mulroney in "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There" at NO Gallery. These artists hail from different regions yet overlap in their hard-bitten manners of exploring mortality and contemporary...
At Marc Selwyn a year ago, "Jay DeFeo: The Texture of Color" included small paintings on paper from 1982-86. Those works imparted an inventive sense of discovery while also showcasing the artist's formidable expressive talent. The same is true for her current show,...
Holly Elander's quiet Los Angeles cityscapes exude a strong presence. Desolation brings out the personalities of inanimate features that would otherwise be easily overlooked in neglected byways. This exhibition includes 21 acrylic-on-panel paintings from two divergent...
Jasmine Little's ceramics and Robert Nava's paintings both incorporate breezily limned imagery of fantastic creatures and people. At a distance, the large stoneware vessels in Little's show, "Retrograde," appear deceptively old-fashioned; their brown-and-white palette...
Wilmington-based artist Armando G. Cortés has incorporated realities and legends from his birthplace, Urequío, a small farming town in Michoacán, Mexico, into a captivating installation titled "Reverberante." Natural springs run through some Urequío adobe homes' clay...
Orkideh Torabi's painted burlesques of men offer sardonic commentary on patriarchal oppression of women in Iran and beyond. The Tehran-born, Chicago-based artist's 2017 LA show featured mostly frontal portraits of caricatural men whose stark, formal poses against...
Eileen Cowin's solo exhibition at As Is comprises eight photographic works chosen from two series, "Mad Love," and "Kafka's Diary." Each of Cowin's pictures cleverly pairs two disparate photos whose strange vertical abutment evokes emotion and suggests open-ended...
Hanna Hur believes in art's power to generate supernatural experiences. By repetitively drawing geometric forms and fashioning chain mail sculptures link by link, she places herself in meditative states of mind receptive to subconscious thoughts; the resulting...
Alejandro Cardenas' paintings present surreal myths woven partly from the artist's personal memories. The title of his show, "Calusa Garden," refers to a park near his childhood home on Key Biscayne, Florida. The periwinkle blue skies and green forests in paintings...
Imagine yourself gazing meditatively at a set table in a light-filled kitchen. If you stare long enough, utensils and fruits seem to detach from reality and take on peculiar identities of their own. Lost in reverie, you begin to wonder about the secret lives of these...
"Life Still," the title of Kirsten Everberg's show at 1301PE, underscores her paintings' implied precariousness. Bringing to mind the line from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "All that lives must die," Everberg's animal subjects appear quite animate; yet as in Dutch vanitas...
Tomm El-Saieh's paintings evoke the mystical feeling of hearing incantations in strange tongues. Born of mixed heritage in Port-au-Prince, El-Saieh migrated to Miami at the age of 12. The artist is steeped in Western and Caribbean art traditions; he co-directs an...
Tandem shows by Candice Lin and Genesis Belanger divide François Ghebaly into two curious realms as materially engaging as they are thought-provoking. Each artist's work is replete with backstories of historical and anthropological purport. Incorporating weaving,...
Greyhounds sprint in front of Frank Stella paintings; songbirds perch before Rothkos; a metallurgist pours glowing popcorn from a giant crucible: These are just a few goings-on in "All of the Above," Ralph Allen Massey's entertaining painting show at bG Gallery....
In the early 1980's, George Condo coined the neologism "artificial realism" to describe his unique manner of interpreting human contrivance through emotively exaggerative paintings. Rather than growing stale, his work only seems to increase in relevance as reality...
Heidi Hahn's grandly scaled paintings lend iconic status to plain-Jane women going about quotidian routines. Breezily limned in free-flowing brushstrokes and translucent washes, her anonymous characters appear lost in dreamy, meditative worlds even as they shop,...
In a world where robots gauge workers' bathroom breaks, attending to one's basic needs is seen as an indulgence. Current buzz around "self-care," a notion often shrouded in a mystical feel-good aura as though it were elusive as a rainbow, attests the dysfunctionality...
Via distortion and exaggeration, Christina Quarles strips figures to their essence, exposing aspects of the human condition in the raw. Recalling Francis Bacon with a more hopeful, feminine twist, the large-scale paintings in Quarles' Regen Projects show, "But I Woke...
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